Stories, poems, and reads that feed the literary mind.
01 — STORIES
Afọpẹ́fólúwa Òjó is a Nigerian writer splitting her time between Lagos and Amsterdam, whose fiction has been longlisted for both the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and the Elizabeth Jolley Prize, per her author note on Lolwe. She’s also a creative technologist with residencies at SAVVY Contemporary Berlin-Lagos and ZK/U Berlin. Her story “Come Come, Let’s Go Cycling in the Woods,” published on Lolwe in May 2026, is migration fiction that earns its place for its unflinching handling of trauma alongside a genuinely surprising turn into magical realism.
The story follows a Nigerian narrator who flees the country after retaliating against the man who assaulted their sister, eventually resettling in what the story calls “the Hinterlands” — evocative of the Dutch countryside, echoing the author’s own Lagos–Amsterdam life. An ordinary bike ride through the woods with a new neighbor turns strange when the narrator’s body begins reacting to recurring, worsening insect bites. Woven between these present-day scenes are flashbacks — an apprenticeship learning shoemaking, and strained long-distance calls with a mother back home who doesn’t fully grasp what her child survived or fled. The story builds toward a quietly radical ending: rather than resolving the trauma through confrontation, the protagonist finds peace by imagining, or becoming, a tree — a dissolving of self into the landscape that reads as both surrender and transcendence. A migration story that refuses the expected redemption arc for something stranger. (Source)
Read more of Afọpẹ́fólúwa Òjó’s work, including her essay “The Madness of Good Thoughts,” at A Long House.
02 — BOOKS
What to read before next week’s issue:
The Disappearers by Marlon James · Riverhead Books, 2026 (publisher page) — A Kingston-set crime novel about the 1988 disappearance of two gay men after a homophobic attack on a theater troupe, built from interview fragments, journal entries, and letters, and shortlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize (Booker Prizes, Kirkus).
Mazywood by Tananarive Due · Saga Press, 2026 (publisher page) — A supernatural family saga tracing three generations from a Black actress’s rise in 1920s Hollywood to her filmmaker grandson uncovering what she buried, which Kirkus called “perilously close to a career triumph” (Kirkus review).
Dèy by Edwidge Danticat · Alfred A. Knopf, 2026 (publisher page) — Named for the Haitian Creole word for mourning, this novel follows a Miami real-estate agent who survives a random shooting and is forced to reckon with buried family secrets spanning Miami and Haiti (Kirkus review).
The Siren by Tomi Adeyemi · Henry Holt and Company, 2026 (bookseller listing) — A dark-academia departure from her Orïsha trilogy, following a Nigerian American student drawn into a secret society called the Sirens, built on a new “Soul Magic” system Adeyemi has called the rawest thing she’s written (Brittle Paper).
The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman by Deesha Philyaw · Mariner Books, 2026 (Kirkus listing) — Philyaw’s debut novel follows a Georgia megachurch first lady chasing a pageant title while a scandal unravels her church’s elite clique — Kirkus calls it “a rollicking satire of Black megachurch culture.”
The Perilous Fight by Colin Kaepernick · Legacy Lit, 2026 (publisher page) — A memoir tracing Kaepernick’s path from a Black child adopted by a white family to NFL quarterback to blackballed activist; Kirkus gave it a starred review calling it “a candid, observant, generous chronicle of his development” (Kirkus review).
03 — OPPS
For writers and authors:
Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets (African Poetry Book Fund) — Deadline: December 1, 2026 — For African poets submitting an unpublished first full-length manuscript (50+ pages); no entry fee; winner receives $1,000 and publication by University of Nebraska Press — Apply: Submittable
Cave Canem Fellowship (Cave Canem Foundation) — Deadline: October 6, 2026, 11:59pm ET — For Black poets of African descent (21+) applying for a fully-funded, free week-long summer retreat with workshops (June 2027); no fee — Apply: Submittable
Bridport Prize — Memoir Award (Bridport Prize) — Deadline: September 30, 2026, 23:59 BST — Open worldwide to writers 16+, published or unpublished, submitting a memoir-in-progress (5,000–8,000 word extract); £1,500 plus a year-long mentoring package; £26 entry fee — Apply: Submittable
X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize (Texas Review Press) — Deadline: September 30, 2026 — Open to poets 18+ writing in English submitting a 50–100 page unpublished manuscript; $28 fee; $10,000 advance, publication, and a Vermont Studio Center residency — Apply: Submittable
Fish Short Story Prize (Fish Publishing) — Deadline: November 30, 2026 — Open to writers of any nationality writing in English submitting a previously-unpublished story up to 5,000 words; welcomes emerging and established writers; €24 entry fee — Apply: Fish Publishing
04 — SPOTLIGHT
Romeo Oriogun
Romeo Oriogun’s second full collection, The Gathering of Bastards, was named a finalist for the 2025 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the $100,000 prize Claremont Graduate University calls the world’s largest monetary award for a single poetry collection (WritingAfrica). It’s the latest line on a citation list that already includes the 2023 Julie Suk Award, the 2024 Nebraska Book Award, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist spot, and a Derek Walcott Prize shortlisting (FAU, Afrocritik).
Oriogun is Nigerian, born and raised in Benin City. His path to the page ran through an army school in Lagos, a stint teaching primary school at fourteen, and years as a road safety marshal with Nigeria’s Federal Road Safety Corps before poetry became his full-time work (Open Country Mag). He left Nigeria for Ghana in 2018 after homophobic threats followed his win of the 2017 Brunel International African Poetry Prize, then moved to the United States on an Artist Protection Fund fellowship at Harvard. He later earned an MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and now teaches as an assistant professor of creative writing at Florida Atlantic University (FAU faculty page). In 2022, his collection Nomad made him the first openly queer writer to win Nigeria’s largest literary honor, the Nigeria Prize for Literature. He told the Daily Iowan that every poem he writes is “a curiosity to understand what’s happening around me or within me,” and that exile, for him, is simply “trying to stay alive” (Daily Iowan).
That tension between staying alive and staying whole runs through The Gathering of Bastards. Reviewing the 71-poem collection for Brittle Paper, one critic reads it less as a lament against exile itself than as a prayer against exiling — against the nations that eject people rather than the fact of displacement. Water recurs as the book’s central image, standing for migration routes, impossible translation, and the body’s own instability. The review also highlights Oriogun’s invented term “shurroty” — his word for the specific shame of having to beg for food while stranded in a foreign city (Brittle Paper). The Academy of American Poets frames the book similarly: an account of leaving home, surviving abroad, and the specific ache of wanting to return without a country left to return to (Poets.org).
At one point in the collection, Oriogun writes about language itself failing to hold what has been lost: “now I write in water, / I know there is no translation for our sorrow” (Brittle Paper). It’s a book where, as he told Open Country Mag, the older he gets, the more he realizes “urgency is not running all the lines” — control, not velocity, is the discipline he’s after now.
Read first: The Gathering of Bastards (University of Nebraska Press)
That’s this week’s GetMeLit. See you Monday for the Daily.
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